nodded. "Something like that, maybe. Or a month. I
know a month. Thirty days has September, April,
November, and June. All the rest have thirty-six ex-
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cept leap year whicli ends too soon." She finished her beer. "Something like that."
Ruby signalled for another beer for Flossie as she took a small sip of hers. "Was he working on a big case?" "Zack? Zack never had a big case in his life," Flossie said. "Trying to be the big man. Sitting there in my apartment, writing his dumb letter, messing it up, throwing papers on my floor. Is that any way to act? I ask you. Any way to act? Throwing papers on my clean floor. Dumb letter. Trying to be big man." Her beer came and she concentrated on it. "What'd he do with the letter?" Ruby asked. Flossie shrugged, a small movement at the epicenter of her body that sent shock waves careening through the surrounding flesh for seconds after. Starting at her shoulders, the shrug shuddered downward until it reached the seat of the overburdened stool, and then the aftershocks caromed back up so that her shoulders, which started it all, shuddered again.
She drank her beer to calm the earthquake. "What'd he do with the letter?" Ruby repeated. "Who knows? Wrote it. Envelope. My stamp on it. My good stamp. Yeah. I mailed it." "To the President?"
"Thass right. To the President of the United States of Watchamacallit, himself. I mailed it. Me. Zack can't even mail nothing right, I gotta mail it." .
Ruby nodded. So much for the letter. Now the only question left was where was Zack Meadows.
Ruby drank with Flossie until the tavern closed, trying to get a clue on Meadows's whereabouts, but the big woman knew nothing.
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À -
Two barflies offered to walk them home but Flossie told them loudly that ladies like she and her friend Ruby did not have anything to do with lowerr class people like that.
They laughed.
Ruby told them to fuck off.
Flossie led the way toward the door.
Ruby was following her.
One of the men staggered off his stool and grabbed Ruby's left arm.
Her right hand darted into her big oversized pocket-book and brought out a .32 caliber snubnose revolver, which she inserted into the man's left nostril.
His eyes widened in shock and he let go of Ruby's arm. He staggered back to his stool.
Ruby nodded wordlessly and replaced the gun. She met Flossie outside on the sidewalk.
"Gone home now," Flossie said.
"I'll walk with you," Ruby said.
"Don't has to walk with me. 1 walks all time myself."
"That's all right," Ruby said. "I'll walk with you anyway."
"Didden get chancet to clean apartment," Flossie said.
"All right," Ruby said. "Let's walk."
"Yeah. Walk," Flossie said.
The tenement building was the equivalent, in real property, of Flossie herself. It hadn't been much to start with and had decayed steadily. The halls were dark and Ruby regarded herself as lucky because at • least she could not see the dirt.
Ruby went up the steps, placing her feet down delicately, ready to jump instantly if she should step
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'down on something that squealed or moved. Flossie didn't seem to mind. She stomped up the steps like a Wagnerian soprano marching to center stage to sing about a horse.
Ruby reflected that the worst slums she had ever seen in the United States weren't black people's slums, they were white people's slums. Maybe for a white person to get as poor as a black person required some" kind of extra efíort, some special skill, the kind that could go into making a slum an absolute unliveable hovel.
"Ain't much," Flossie grunted halfway up to the third floor. "But all I can afford right now."
"Zack ever help you with the rent?" Ruby asked. "He only helps racehorses with the rent. Bookies," Flossie said. She liked that so much she repeated it. "He only helps bookies with the rent."
Ruby had thought Zack Meadows's apartment was dirty, but compared with Flossie's, it looked like a Frank Lloyd Wright experiment in open, carefree living.
That the debris and clutter was neither new nor unusual, Flossie demonstrated by picking her way accurately through the piles of rubble, weaving her way to her bed, and collapsing on it in a landslide of moving flesh that rocked the bed.
"Good night, Flossie," Ruby said. "I'll see myself out."
The only answer was Flossie's raucous snoring. Ruby closed the door behind her and looked around the room. If Meadows had written his letter here, he would have done it at the kitchen table. Flossie had talked about his throwing papers on the floor. Ruby looked around under the table and against the wall,
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found three crumpled-up pieces of paper from a yellow legal-size pad.
She read them under the bare kitchen bulb. They represented Meadows's initial attempts to write his report to the President, before he had hit upon the unique literary device of attacking Italian jockeys and all policemen.
Ruby read the three pages and smiled to herself.
"Lifeline Laboratory," she said aloud. "Well, well, well, well, well."
She put the papers in her pocketbook, after first shaking them carefully to make sure there weren't carrying any nonpaying passengers, then let herself out of the apartment, locking it behind her.
Time to sleep. She would look into the Lifeline Laboratory tomorrow.
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CHAPTER TEN
The two men had been following them since they had left the Upper East Side Clinic. Remo had known it without knowing why he knew it. He had not seen them and they had made no sound that any other pair of pedestrians would not have made, but they were not just pedestrians. They were following Chiun and him, and somehow he had just sensed their presence.